Try Not to Think

Forgetting the Forgotten Rebels

Too much thinking can spoil your enjoyment.

So, standing in a dingy Toronto nightclub, I try to shut my mind off and travel back a decade to a time when I didn’t think about music, a time when I just took pleasure from it, a time when the band on stage – the Forgotten Rebels – had provided me with hours of casual enjoyment. It doesn’t work. My mind insists on having one question answered: How could you have ignored what they were singing?

It was a cold night in November of 1996, and I had travelled down to Queen Street West to confront my memories and my record collection, and to do some research for a book I’m writing on racism and homophobia in rock music. A Forgotten Rebels concert seemed a logical place to gather impressions. The Rebels – originally from Hamilton – were one of Ontario’s earliest punk bands, along with such groups as the Viletones, the Diodes and Teenage Head. They were also one of punk’s most gleefully racist bands.

When the Rebels hit the stage, I barely have time to notice that singer Mickey DeSadest looks much older and fatter than I remember before he launches into the band’s traditional opener, “Bomb the Boats,” their tribute to the 70s refugees who fled certain death to escape by sea to Canada. Within seconds, the audience is transformed from a bored crowd to a pogoing crush pumping their fists and singing along: “I don’t want no foreign pricks to take my job away from me/ My tax dollars paid their ransom/ Would they do the same for me?/ I don’t, I don’t want them in my home/ I don’t want them around so let them drown/ Bomb the boats and feed their fucking flesh to the fish.”

The audience obviously knows the lyrics, and they don’t seem concerned about them, just as I wasn’t when I started playing Rebels’ albums. Caught up in the band’s tight, melodic, undeniably catchy, Ramones/Pistols sound, I had abandoned myself to enjoyment of the music. I, too, had known the lyrics and sung along to them, without really pausing to think about what a repulsive message a song like “A.I.D.S.” is really sending: “You wonder what he did to get him in that awful way – in an oxygen tent singing glad to be gay/ AIDS, now you’re gonna die/ AIDS, in hell you’re gonna fry.”

That’s the problem with rock music. If the music is good, if you can tap your toes, or bob your head, or play air guitar to it, the lyrics are all too often ignored or excused. If they could be controversial, then that just adds a little extra fillip of enjoyment to the music. It might shock your parents or your teachers or your uptight friends. It’s cool, man, lighten up. And you do. “I know it’s only rock ‘n’ roll,” sang the Rolling Stones, “but I like it.” Mick was right, rock ‘n’ roll is just fun. Racist lyrics are intended simply as a joke. None of those bands – the Stones, Sex Pistols, Black Flag, X, Fear, Viletones – actually meant what they were singing. Right? Right.

Well, sometimes, as on this night, when the band is loose and sloppy and the sound system comprehensively sucks, you actually have time to seriously contemplate what rock singers are saying so much of the time, and however hard you search for the joke, it scares you.

In 1979, Lester Bangs, the late, great rock critic wrote an article entitled “The White Noise Supremacists,” which addressed this very issue.

“Maybe in a better world than this, such parlor games would amount to cleansing jet offtakes, and between friends, where a certain bond of mutual trust has been firmly established, good-natured racial tradeoffs can be part of the vocabulary of understood affections. But beyond that, trouble begins – when you fail to realize that no matter how harmless your intentions are, there is no reason to think that any shit that comes out of your mouth is going to be understood or happily received. Took me a long time to find it out, but those words are lethal, man, and you shouldn’t just go slinging them around for effect … If you’re black or Jewish or gay, those little vernacular epithets are bullets that riddle your guts and then fester and burn there, like torture-flak hailing on you wherever you go … Another reason for getting rid of all those little verbal barbs is that no matter how you intend them, you can’t say them without risking misinterpretation by some other bigoted asshole; your irony just might be his cup of hate.”

There’s no room for irony in rock ‘n’ roll. It isn’t film or literature. When you record or sing a song, the song is all there is. There’s no context, no explanation, no space to say “I don’t really mean it,” there’s just the performance. Mickey DeSadest may say, as he has in various interviews over the years, that his songs are jokes, merely part of a persona. And some of those songs are genuinely funny, in a tasteless, twisted sort of way, like “Elvis Is Dead”: “The big fat goof is dead, dead, dead/ Millions of assholes mourn his death/ I’m gonna steal his body from its place of rest”; or “Fuck Me Dead”, their ode to necrophilia: “A pillow in a coffin’s just as nice as a bed”. But these songs, with their obvious jokes, make it even harder to discern the slightest trace of humour in “Gulls peck flesh from rancid stiffs decaying on the deep blue sea/ Bits and pieces here and there, bomb them far from my country/ Do you, do you want them in your home?/ Do you want them finding you alone?/ They’re commies, subhuman subversives/ They’re commies/ human living curses…I don’t want them around so let them drown/ Bomb the boats and feed the fish.” Whether DeSadest has any sympathy for the Heritage Front or not, the sentiments in his songs, especially early ones like “3rd Homosexual Murder” (“I got away with a 3rd homosexual murder, and you might be the 4th”) are uncomfortably close to those expressed in white supremacist literature found in Canada.

You see, Mick was wrong. It’s not “only” rock ‘n’ roll. Rock music is an indelible part of our common cultural discourse. Even those who hate and despise every power chord ever played know about rock music. It’s part of our lives, it’s part of our socialization, it’s part of the way we think. And in attaining this cultural ubiquity, rock music has also obtained a unique power, especially over young people, who through various musical eras and heroes, have screamed, fainted and lost control over their idols. Some fans not only faithfully buy the albums, watch the videos, wear the t-shirts and go to the concerts, but also find in the music a degree of sympathy and understanding they cannot find anywhere else in their lives. When Seattle’s grunge-rock leaders, Nirvana, released their first major-label album, millions of people turned their songs of angst and misery into a world-wide, and highly profitable, phenomenon. And since Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain killed himself, at least a dozen of his fans have been distraught enough over his death or their own lives to follow his example. Cobain is, of course, an extreme example of the influence rock musicians wield, but he does serve to illustrate that much of that influence is not necessarily salutary. Mickey DeSadest may reach only a limited audience, but when Axl Rose sings, millions of people listen. And Axl sings: “Immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me/ They come to our country and think they’ll do as they please/ Like start a mini Iran or spread some fucking disease.” These songs have an effect, serving at an absolute minimum to further justify the acceptance of casual racism and stereotyping within our culture of social discourse.

And, of course, while I’m considering the semiotics of race and music, the Rebels are playing on regardless. In between further songs about race relations like “I Left My Heart In Iran” (“That Ayatollah really must be a whore/ Filth eating camel sweat, he’s a sickie Moslem … Bring back the Shah, that’s where it began/ Should have dropped some bombs and watched how they ran”) and tender-hearted paeans to women (“Shit for Brains” and “Autosuck”), the band crashes into “White Riot” by the Clash.

This is interesting. Since its release in 1977, the song has frequently been criticized as racist, and has been adopted as a rallying call by various white supremacist groups. However, the Clash, the original lefty punks, certainly didn’t intend it that way. Joe Strummer says he wrote the song after witnessing a black riot against police in London, and intended it as a call for dispossessed whites to stage their own fight against police and state in solidarity with black activists. The song’s lyrics, though, are disturbingly open to misinterpretation. “Black men gotta lot of problems/ But they don’t mind throwing a brick/ White people go to school/ Where they teach you how to be thick/ White riot/ I wanna riot/ White riot/ A riot of my own.” But whatever Strummer’s intentions, they are completely obviated by the Rebels’ performance of his song. Coming, as it does, in the middle of a set punctuated by frequently offensive numbers, “White Riot” loses any progressive meaning, sounding instead like the calls of the Heritage Front or the Klan for “white patriots” to fight fire with fire in defence of Aryan nationhood. The crowd, once again, goes into their fist-pumping sing-along, and my internal debate deepens.

The song demonstrates exactly how slippery issues of race can be when it comes to rock music. And it becomes even more complex when one realizes that even at a Forgotten Rebels concert, I am not the only person of colour in attendance. In part, that’s because rock music has become a factor not only in the formation of a person’s social identity, but in the formation of a person’s racial identity within society. Rock music has a long history of being part of a rebellion; indeed, the music was largely based on rebellion, and still is, to a large extent, even if only as an illusory image. But rock music has also gained such wide-spread acceptance, such popularity, that it has also become a potent part of mainstream society and even a defender of the status quo. To know and enjoy rock is to be part of that mainstream society. For whites, rock music confirms one’s place in the mainstream, while allowing the continued tang of thinking of oneself as a rebel. For people of colour, rock music often represents a far more concrete rebellion against one’s ancestral culture and expectations, but an acquaintance with rock music also provides an entree into mainstream, white-dominated society. It means, however, that when rock songs attack difference in race, gender or sexual orientation, it is necessary to develop a studied ignorance of the fact that such attacks may also focus on you. It means, in other words, ignoring your heritage in some crucial ways; even, perhaps, developing some degree of self-hatred.

In 1981, rock critic and scholar Greil Marcus wrote an article about the way in which racism was permeating the punk music sweeping through the West Coast at the time. He talks of the impact of the title track from X’s first album. “The opening lines of X’s searing ‘Los Angeles’ (‘She had started to hate/ Every nigger and Jew/ Every Mexican that gave her lotta shit/ Every homosexual and the idle rich’) tell us not that the subject of the song has her hangups but that the objects of her rage are types, not like us, deserving of the contempt they get: crimes against nature. The song has enough musical bite to make any nigger, Jew, Mexican, homosexual or idle rich want to hear the tune again, and then think ‘That’s not me, I’m not like that,’ and that is the true black hole of the number, and of L.A. punk: attacked, one may side with one’s attacker, and accept the terms of the attack.”

By the time the show ends, after one rather perfunctory encore, my head is spinning with all these complexities, and I cannot remember what in the hell I ever saw in this band. Could I ever have been as naive or downright ignorant as all these fervent Rebels fans? When I get home, I put on some of their albums, looking for answers, and then it all comes back to me. They wrote good songs. Live, they may now be old and fat and sloppy, but on vinyl they still sound as young and tight and tuneful as ever, and even though I’ve thought extensively about how repulsive they are, the music still attracts me. So, almost against my will, I decide I’m going to keep my Forgotten Rebels albums. I know my enjoyment of those albums will never again be innocent, but I also know that I will continue to derive a guilty pleasure from them. I reach what is really a rather unpleasant conclusion: I can’t change rock music, and I can’t stop listening to it. The music and I will simply have to reach a new understanding.